Bet you're a Liam – software puts names to faces

IS IT possible that someone just looks like a Lucy? Or has a face that means they could only really be a John? You might think not, but new software has shown that it is possible to take an educated guess at someone's name with just one look at their face.

"First names are not given to babies at random," says Andrew Gallagher of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Parents' choices are influenced by factors such as gender, ethnicity and popular names at the time.

Gallagher and colleagues used tagged photos from the Flickr website to build up a database of named faces and then trained a computer to recognise the contributing factors. For example, Alejandras tend to have darker hair and skin than Heathers, while Ethans tend to be younger than Davids.

The team tested their system using faces belonging to people with the top 100 names in the US – 48 male, 48 female and two neutral – which cover roughly 20 per cent of the population. The computer was able to guess the correct name about 4 per cent of the time. OK, that's not great, but it's four times as good as the success rate achieved by random guesses and about a third better than human guesswork.

With improvements in accuracy, the software could be used to automatically harvest the names from online picture captions to tag the people in the picture, Gallagher suggests. The work will be presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Portland, Oregon, in June. Gallagher says he intends to expand the database to encompass all known names in the US.

Kevin Bowyer at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana says there may be commercial applications for this software, but it will be hard to improve the accuracy because of the sheer number of different names out there. "I don't quite buy there is a distinctive 'Heather' face," he says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Bet you're a Liam – software aims to put names to faces"

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